Are we surprised at the contempt in which politicians hold the voter? There was a comment the other day on the radio from a frustrated Brit who mewed: “If my vote really meant anything they would take it away.” The honest answer is, no need... it’s simply ignored.
Do some men allow themselves such sartorial sins that they verge on crimes against humanity? The disappearance of men in sandals was one of the few blessings of the Dark Ages. And yet there seems to be a renaissance of this fashion disaster made worse by the adoption of wearing these atrocities with white socks. Who on earth outside mung-bean-eating tree-huggers thinks this footwear is acceptable? Puh-lease don’t bleat they are good for walking. They are not. All they do is present lunch to various ants, centipedes and any other carnivore creepy crawlies. Unlike ladies dainty tootsies, men’s hooves are unsightly things that should not be exposed... mine are known to scare children and horses.
Have written instructions survived? Whenever I buy anything, I am required to download instructions or manuals as if the digital video age never happened. You can download a video on everything from how to get to the next level of Minecraft, to poaching a peacock, or sticking false eyelashes on your goldfish; so why can’t all instruction manuals be videos? Yes, if I really want to get down to the minutiae of how my MP4 player can change the space time continuum or my mobile phone will connect with the dead, I can read up on the fine print. However, 90% of people (and 100% of normal ones) simply want to know the basics of how their latest toy works. So please, let’s just have a video showing me? It would certainly make buying the odd sex toy more interesting! Part of the reason I find digital currency so complex is not the theory of having a secure method of payment outside of the clutches of government or banks but the assumption the guy in the street understands how to actually go about the process. It’s Gobbledigook. Double gobbledigook if you tried Das Coin and the electronic WebWallet nonsense via NetLeaders. In an age when FaceTime, Zoom, Skype and Instagram are the communication medium of choice, why am I still asked to download a PDF on how to work a camera! I mean it’s a camera. Visual medium. Which bright spark in marketing thought: “Well, once we have sold this, let’s send a booklet to read that’s a couple of hundred pages long....” Show me how and I might even buy some of the bolt in extras like telephotos etc.
Do people moan about doing things they hate? Don’t like washing up? Drop a few tea-cups or leave a couple of cornflakes welded to a plate. Hate spring cleaning? Dribble drops of eggshell enamel onto the dog’s head. My father, when asked to change his first nappy (and they were toweling ones back in the day) gagged at the smell then promptly flushed waste and nappy down the loo. He blocked the drains for an entire apartment block and was forbidden from ever changing my diapers again. Result! At school I found playing cricket matches a waste of four sunny afternoon hours. Dragooned into playing against another school because I was a half decent bowler, I swapped the ball for a tomato. Splat! Cricket whites covered in red spots. I was called to the housemaster, told I was a disgrace to the school and as punishment I would never be allowed to play cricket again. It took the acting skills of De Niro to look thoroughly upset, rather than punch the air for joy.
Has the great European jaw-jaw resulted in a draw-draw? When the history of Brexit is eventually written, no matter on which side of the great divide you stand, the sheer lack of understanding by politicians as to what a clock is, will stand as a supreme lesson. I cannot think of a peace treaty let alone a deal negotiation which has taken two years... and that does not look like it’s long enough! At the time of writing this blog, it seems like the negotiation is going into extra time to prevent everyone throwing their toys out of the pram. Yet, so far this chit-chat (note: with our friends and allies) has cost the British taxpayer on expenses, travel and outside consultation fees around £600m. Nearly a billion dollars and it’s got nowhere. That is in itself such a monumental achievement I have to pinch myself whilst re-reading my own text. To paraphrase dear Winston, “Never in the field of human negotiation has so much time been wasted at so much cost by so few to the utter bewilderment of so many...” Like him or not I suspect the UK might have saved a fortune by asking perma-tanned occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue to thrash out a deal for a fee of say £100m, with a £100m bonus if he could wrap it all up in the time it takes the English cricket team to play a test series. Sadly, La Donald had just got another job when this all started so we might have needed another slippery deal maker. Anyone know what happened to the other Donald, Don King?
Have these little blogs been sprouting up elsewhere? Recently I may have been suffering delusions of grandeur as a bunch of themes from my recent missives seem to have been turning up in the wider press in a number of musings of weekly columnists. Of course it could simply be that great minds think alike and fools seldom differ. However recent posts about the Oscars (Oscar night... just has me riveted to my seat, January 24th) and hidden car rental charges (Extra! Extra! Read All About it... Actually we’d rather you didn’t which is why we put the extra costs in the fine print, January 5th) have both popped up in British national newspapers. So if you are a bored columnist itching for a quick answer to your highly paid weekly article... sod off. Otherwise I shall be forced to ask the advise of my litigious Japanese lawyer Mr. So-Sue-Me. Of course these regurgitations of my latest ramblings could be pure coincidence in the same way as those columns which have included ideas might find their articles repeated here... quite uncanny!
Am I fascinated by life’s Don Quixotes, hopelessly charging at windmills. My son, (a certified commercial pilot) was accosted recently by someone trying to persuade him the Earth is flat, Australia does not exist and vapour trails are really chemical sprays created by NASA to fry our minds..... If you are bored, whiling away ten minutes with the terminally loopy is quite fun. Never try and disagree. Arguing with the terminally deluded is pointless. Much more fun is to appear shocked and ask for more details. I am simply amazed at the pigheaded resilience these theorists can display with the information now available, which so easily punctures their balloon. A quick trail of the internet on conspiracy theories is only really disturbing when you realise these people can vote.
Give a damn about the Oscars? The whole thing has got further up its arse than a proctologist’s middle finger. No one cares, because the last decade’s nominated movies are quasi arthouse that do not resonate with the audience. In an attempt to show making movies is really all abaht aaaart, dahling, the Academy has recently become all coy about nominating truly mass appeal movies. And who was responsible for this sudden fit of hubris, a desire to show a more cultured less crass side of the entertainment industry? A man imbued with a strong sense of the aspirations of the pinnacle of quality and not our baser instincts; Harvey Weinstein. Pay attention Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. You want to know why the Oscar shindig is as exciting as watching toast getting cold? Try looking at the movies you allow to get nominated....let alone win! The last ten years’ winners were , LaLa Land, Moonlight, Spotlight, Birdman, 12 Years a Slave, Argo, The Artist, The King’s Speech, The Hurt Locker, Slumdog Millionaire. I can barely remember what most of these are about? They may be worthy but are minnows compared with the 1970’s. The winners that decade were: Patton, The French Connection, The Godfather, The Sting, The Godfather Part II, One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, Rocky, Annie Hall, The Deer Hunter, Kramer vs Kramer. You’ve probably seen them all, and I can pretty clearly remember the stories even though released 40-50 years ago. US viewer audience for 1970 Oscars 55.2 million. US viewer audience last year, 26.5 million The only thing that sank faster was The Titanic (one of the last broad appeal movies to win back in 1997/8). I am pretty certain neither Rocky, Patton nor The Sting if made now, would even be nominated. So dear fellows and voters of the Academy, try and remember you are in the ENTERTAINMENT Industry. Get back to your roots and out of your ego. Start nominating movies that mean something to the general public and they might watch the awards!
Does any advertiser not understand that POA/ Price on Application actually stands for Pisses Off Anyone? When idly leafing through a six-month-old copy of Country Life at the dentist, I am amazed at the practice of sticking POA against the price of some of the houses advertised for sale. Same for when I pour over my monthly car porn magazines and fantasise about which classic car I might buy when my ship comes in (and after I have suitably bribed my wife with whatever retail therapy most floats her boat). What is the logic behind Price On Application? It’s an immediate turn off. Is it because there is such heat in the market that from day of publication to day of printing that prices will inexorably rise? I thought in terms of property, that was illegal and called gazumping. You always agree a price with the vendor that’s as fixed as an airline stewardesses smile. We live in a digital age. Prices can be checked and compared in a nano-second. Is the advertiser insinuating: “So, pay attention here. Most of you great unwashed, don’t get your hopes up. You cannot afford it and I simply cannot be bothered to talk to anyone before I know he or she has the readies to cough up the ludicrous sum I don’t dare print.” This is appalling customer service as it forces me to pick up a phone or log on to reveal this nugget of information. My time is being wasted by this ludicrous printed version of the dance of the seven veils. Don’t be coy Mr. Advertiser. Show me what you got! On occasions when bored (usually when waiting at airports) I give in to the devil in me and ring the offending advertiser: “Good morning. I wonder if you would tell me the price you are asking for the ‘Gilt-Palace-Nightmare’ in Dubai or ‘Please-stop-and-arrest-me-gold-plated-yuk-wagon’ advertised in the current edition of Shiny Things I can’t Really Afford?” When given the number, my unerring response is: “That cheap! No wonder you did not want to advertise the price as it shows how little you know about market value.” Sit back and then listen to a ten-minute barrage of self-important claptrap. It passes the time before boarding.
Do I get paranoid about waiters who hover and watch over me?
We have just returned from an exercise in fear that my wife called a holiday in Nepal. Somewhere around 50 years old I turned from someone happy to do a handstand on the top of the 50 metre/160 ft high Roman Aqueduct The Pont du Gard to becoming afraid of heights. When I was in my twenties, before a litany of accidents, I was scared of nothing. Fall off a horse a few times and suddenly it gets harder to get back in that saddle. Therefore the knocks and bangs from reckless adventuring in my life has annoyingly driven fear through experience into my psyche. The self preservation instinct has turned me from Leo the Lion into The Cowardly Lion.
Nevertheless I was always told to face down your fears... so not to be outdone by my fearless (and younger) wife, I gritted my teeth through a helicopter ride across Annapurna range and a plane ride to Mount Everest! Added to this was a jump off Mount Annapurna in a hang glider and a trip on the world’s fastest (120KPH 80 MPH) and longest (2km 1.2mile) zip line. Toss into that an encounter with several rhinos and a tiger... all without having to change my underpants.
My wife on the other hand thought all this a hoot and in every photo is seen grinning like Jack Nicholson in One flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest while I had the fixed manic smile when Jack played the Joker in Batman. I have tried to explain to her to make the most of it as soon, she too will be grabbed by old age jitters.
Does a budget deal end up costing me more than the major players these guys are meant to be undercutting ?! I recently rented a car for a week in London. Using the magic of the internet I found a car rental from a hotel near Heathrow airport at a significant discount to the normal agencies. It was so cheap I was half expecting a pony and trap. I should have smelled a rat when I picked up the car. There was a near forensic search for scratches dings and dents. And it was raining. I just wanted the car, signed and jumped in. On returning the car the inspecting agent swore blind a tiny blemish caused by a minor stone chip or possibly a large wasp entitled them to deduct £220 from my deposit; making the car more expensive than it’s major brand competitors, most of whom would see a minute stone chip as normal wear and tear and not subject to a ludicrous additional cost. It will cost zip to repair. Car is black. A touch up pen. 15 seconds. Moaning in the cab that drove me to the terminal (another extra cost as the supposed shuttle bus was less regular than a 12 year old’s brushing his teeth). “Happens all the time mate. They seem to find dings on practically each return. Every punter I collect complains. Not as cheap as you think, should take a taxi...” This has made me wonder if this nano nitpicking can be countered. The car was empty when I collected it and I was told there was a like for like policy but I returned it half full. Can I drain the excess fuel please? I want a refund for the microns of cotton rubbed off my trousers by the rough seat upholstery and a new set of soles for my shoes having scuffed against the pedals. Oh....and the £1,200 deposit they forced me to make because I declined to take out their sky high insurance ( the standard hefty extra hidden cost) is meant to be back in three working days. But if it takes three weeks, you think I get interest? Pah, as likely as a tap dancing oyster! And no I am not irresponsible. I have a global rental car policy that pays ALL INSURANCE CLAIMS on rental cars for a premium of under £100 a year. This gnat scratch will be my first claim. I bet when I mention the name of the rental company they will be excluded from my renewal!
Do a gazillion people hail the new year with this unintelligible song?
At least in the previous week we have had some variations with Christmas hits of years gone by, but when it comes to the New Year this Scottish caterwauling is all we can summon up.
It might be justifiable if anyone could actually remember the lyrics but like a few other songs (most notably Breakfast at Tiffany’s by Deep Blue Something, Or Blinded by the Light by Bruce Springsteen) I can only remember the song title which I loudly sing out... then mumble through the rest. So for once, this New Year I am somewhere where I will be spared this song.
As you read this, I will have spent a week trying to keep up with my wife trudging through Nepal. Whilst in the sweltering heat of a Maltese summer, I admit a few days amongst the ice and snow of Everest had a certain appeal. I fear as I stand here at midnight with a wind chill factor so cold my pubic hair crackles, I might have made an error of judgement.
All day I was sure I had ice in my veins. As midnight approached I had just had my first shot of local hooch Aila. It had an interesting effect on my stomach, tasting like something between Draino and molten lava. It has had the desired effect. My body is glowing, my cheeks the colour of condemned veal and hot enough to toast a crumpet... but I wonder if the fire will continue all the way down the alimentary canal and result in a sprint to the bathroom. Difficult in yak boots.
Is every avenue of pleasure depicted as a path to Armageddon? This time of the year I must admit I cram too much food and drink into my stomach, but does this really mean the grim reaper will be sharpening his scythe? Christmas overindulgence needs to be balanced with a feeling of wellbeing, a grudging love of fellow man and slipping a few extra £,$,€ into the collection box. But happiness is not a terminal disease. Nevertheless, TV presenters wearing Elf ears or Santa hats, give out dire warnings of all the drawbacks to the holiday season. Frankly if I live a couple of years longer without ever having eaten a chocolate eclair or enjoyed (in my bachelor days) a memorable Christmas Eve in Manila in the warm embrace of a pair of Air Stewardesses and some wakky baccy, I think I would have missed out. As Hunter S. Thompson said, “Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming "Wow! What a Ride!”
Do we let the little green-eyed monster ruin our lives?
Jealousy is a one-way emotion which if you can turn into a two way one can become a source of deep satisfaction.
No doubt at Christmas you are a little irked that Aunt Lottie saw fit to give you a pair of socks printed with reindeer’s antlers but gave her other favourite nephew a Rolex.
True, but in exchange for the Rolex would you really want to be cousin Nathaniel? No. So let it go. You can always get your own back in subtle ways; like asking Aunt Lottie for dinner and sitting her next to someone with opposing political views. Then just serve her something she hates, sit back and watch the show.
I was never a great athlete at school and was more than envious of the sporting prowess of some of my peers until time for the annual Crick race, a 19-mile run that only the very fittest were allowed to enter. It was a huge badge of honour to be selected... in my view to run until nearly dead.
My crocodile tears at being told I had not made the cut were soon dried as I watched the runners cross the finishing line with pain and exhaustion etched over their chiseled features. One up for the couch potatoes!
Can’t magazine editors read a calendar or chocolate manufacturers add up? By the time you read this we will be into December but at the time of writing we are still in mid-November and yet....... I have January issues of several magazines I subscribe to. Now I can understand being two weeks ahead and jumping the gun, but nearly two months is absurd. Most magazines are vaguely topical yet if you take into account the lead time for writing articles, these ‘up to the moment publications’ are staler that last elections political manifesto. As some of you know, I am a petrolhead yet there I am reading about Evo Car of the year in the December edition complete with Santas and elves... in shirtsleeves in sunny September! Which brings me onto another point. How can you match a Christmas advertising campaign you want people to actually read in December when the magazine is dated for February?
Has the law of natural selection seemed to have passed by foodstuffs and things I enjoy? How come a yummy, light and fluffy chocolate eclair, something every sinew in my body urges me to eat, is bad for me at every level, as opposed to a vomit inducing kilo of brussels sprouts which my nutritionist says is bursting with goodness? In everything else our natural urges ensure our survival; be it wanting to have sex to procreate, nonstop chatter thereby ensuring protection by being tribal, a natural aversion to snakes or Politicians or any of a dozen natural instincts that Mother Nature instilled in our subconscious for our own good... except consuming calories, tobacco and alcohol. What happened? Depends who I ask. The Catholic’s and Jews have a thing about guilt. It’s a guilty pleasure to consume single malt whisky or puff on a Cohiba cigar so Yahweh or God, in his infinite wisdom made these things bad for me to test my faith. But that kind of logic is as cracked as the Grand Canyon. It also explains their puritanical views re sex (I like it but cannot have it unless under very strict conditions, passed down by the Almighty, often to people who are forbidden to have sex). If you ask Tom Cruise and his Scientology friends, they may say that liking things that are bad for us is an instinct passed on from the Thetans who visited Earth and had hanky panky with a lot of us humans. So, we inherited their love of all that’s bad as clearly on their planet they all indulged heavily in narcotics, sugar, ciggies and alcohol. All I can say to that is lead me to their planet and explain to me if they are such superior beings, they left their own nirvana?
Can no one programme elevators so they don’t all go up and down in unison? It is nearly fifty years since man started leaving litter on the moon, yet we can still spend a lifetime watching a bank of elevators all going in the same direction and stopping at the same floors... at the same time. I’m no early riser so can cut leaving a hotel a little fine to get to an airport or meeting on time. I once spent 15 minutes in a New York hotel waiting for an elevator to make it up to the 35th floor. Rather like waiting for a bus, long periods of nothing happening, then suddenly all six elevators arrived at my floor at the same time. I suspect to this day if you dusted the elevator call button for fingerprints, mine would come up as I had pushed the damned fluorescent decent arrow so often in exasperation they must still be engraved on it.
Can’t I dress up without a dressing down? I understand the Student Union in Edinburgh have come out with a long list of what is no longer acceptable to wear at fancy dress. Students have been warned that costumes “based on racial or cultural stereotypes” are banned including those portraying Native Americans, Arabs, Nazis, a woman in a Burka, Buddha, a Mullah or a Catholic Priest, (although for some strange reason a nun is OK). They have now added the ‘Cowboy Outfit’! Whoever is President of the Student Union needs to donate his or her body to medical research so we can try and find out how God managed to remove the humour chromosome. This is the thinking that got rid of Kleenex Man Size tissues and will no doubt tell us ‘the time of the month’ is now when females wo-menstruate. Students are meant to be stroppy, rowdy and obsessed with big hopeless causes; saving the polar bear, stopping melting ice caps, ending world poverty or getting Simon Cowell to quit Botox and white T-shirts. They tilt like Don Quixote at these windmills of impossible dreams until the real post graduate world bites. Your bolshy economics student grows up when he has to go spend their cash on white goods (washing machine, fridge, freezer) rather than a few tabs of E. But fancy dress! Is that a needy focus of undergraduate ire?
Are Directors so obsessed about shooting in the dark? In a fit of masochism and boredom I decided to watch the latest Star Wars extravaganza, Solo, on a plane. 85% was shot in the dark. I hardly could make out anything (except the actor playing Solo had all the verve and personality of a week-old halibut). Now all that darkness might look uber cool on a screen wide enough to land a Millennium Falcon on, but puh-lease.... more and more people watch movies on TV screen tablets or even smart phones. Dark Don’t Display. This is a classic case of creatives sticking heads up collective arses and ignoring reality. To see all those effects on tiny screens needs brightness. Here is a tip for the major studios. You want a few extra $ million in downloads? Shoot an entire picture during the day!
Do we all act surprised and indignant that our Russian friends have been peeking into our electronic in-tray. It was ever thus. Ever since Neolithic man discovered he could use an empty coconut shell as an eavesdropping devise and hear his neighbors in the next cave having sex with a Mammoth, we have all been snooping on one another. Let’s face it. Most of what those Russkies tap into is either boring or irrelevant. And if they could actually influence an American election with a couple of tweets as opposed to the $1 billion Hillary and Donald used to batter the electorate into submission, campaign managers and spin doctors should all be made redundant. For the West it’s perfectly OK for 007 to surreptitiously bump off a double agent or photograph the head of the secret police in bed with a nun to blackmail him, but it’s completely outrageous if Putin’s Dzhemys Bondski gets one over on us. If there is one heartening thing to come out of all this, is that the GRU (formerly KGB) aren’t very good. Assassinations go awry, and if the rumours of Trump Golden Rain on Obama’s bed are true, so what? Trump seems unblackmailable! The GRU launched a spy ring of young girls in the 2000’s working at MIT who were so unutterably incompetent that the FBI didn’t bother to arrest them. Tatiana and Lyudmilla (cover names Tiffany and Chablis) even put sticky notes on their computers with their passwords as remembering them as well as the names of the best nightclubs in town was too much for the vodka addled brains.